Category Archive Browsing Category:Startups

I recently met with my friend and former colleague, and over a few drinks we started talking about how our careers have panned out. While I’m fairly happy with what I’ve done so far, his trajectory has been extraordinary. When I asked him how he did it, he told me Perception is everything. He started…

I’m going to be a bit of a fangirl here so bear with me. Twitter is proving to be a great source of reading material, and I’m starting to see the appeal of it now more than ever. I’ve also come to the inevitable conclusion that there is no single formula to become a great entrepreneur,…

I was at Google’s Women Techmakers event this Saturday and it was a somewhat productive way to spend my day. I did expect it to be better than it was, but as always, that’s a case of my own mismanaged expectations. There were several speakers at the event, some of them good and some not so…

I recently started playing Words with Friends on my phone and I quite like it apart from the pesky ads that show up after every single move. It was an interesting study for me though, so I dug a bit deeper and learnt about the gaming industry in the process. Every single number in there was…

You know what’s worse than mind games in relationships? Mind games in interviews… or as they’re more commonly known—puzzles. I had my first experience with them in college during on-campus recruiting. Instead of being quizzed on my engineering chops, I had to answer brainteasers about ants, triangles, and eggs. I was incredibly frustrated to say the least, because…

A lot of people decide to get an MBA because they want to switch careers. I’m not one of them. When I graduated from college in 2013, I didn’t even know about the existence of product management. It was only after I started working at ZeMoSo (a product development startup) that I realized what it was…

My journey on the interwebz began with Neopets when I was eleven. For the uninitiated, it’s a virtual pet community with “free games, shops, auctions, chat and more!” Personally, I couldn’t care less about feeding my pets or clothing them. I knew they weren’t really hungry or dying as they liked to remind me (Neopets are immortal),…

After nearly 7 months working for a travel startup, I have concluded that this industry is a notoriously tricky one. While the concept of travel itself is glamorous, creating a successful travel-centric product is more difficult than it seems. Here are a few reasons why: Monopoly: The most common revenue model for online travel companies…

I’m not usually a huge believer of tracking devices because I think if you do what you’re supposed to be doing, you should be fine. Want to lose weight? Run around the block a few times. Trying to slim down? Eat less. I’ve never meticulously documented the calories I’ve consumed or the number of steps…

First posted on my personal blog Quixotic Semiotic Let me just start by saying how grateful I am to be located in a place like Bangalore where there is absolutely no dearth of opportunities to pick the brains of the best and brightest individuals in the world. The ex-CTO of my company mentioned to me…

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About Me

My name is Nikitha Suryadevara and I am a product manager. I work on the cloud platform at VMware but my interests extend to containers, consumer tech, quantum computing and other seemingly unrelated topics.